Egypt refusing to sign WMD treaties – The Jerusalem Post
Egypt is refusing to sign treaties prohibiting biological and chemical weapons, a week after it was reported that weapons-grade uranium was found in Egypt. The news, released in remarks by Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmad Aboul-Gheit to the Egyptian weekly Ruz Al-Yousuf, could lend credence to speculation that Egypt is seeking weapons of mass destruction…

Madison County Tornado was an F3 – Kentucky.com
Madison County officials have counted about 150 buildings, mostly homes, that were damaged by the tornado. Officials didn’t count barns and silos. It also crossed the Bluegrass Chemical Activity, and skirted the northern edge of the Chemical Limited Area, where deadly nerve agent is stored…

Funds would clear Pueblo cache – The Denver Post
The Department of Defense has allocated $550 million next year for disposal of obsolete chemical weapons at two U.S. facilities, enough to complete in-place disposal of the cache at the Pueblo Chemical Depot by the 2017 congressional deadline…

Pentagon will miss chemical weapons deadline by 9 years – McClatchy
The Pentagon plans on ramping up by more than three years the destruction of chemical weapons at Blue Grass Army Depot, a move that includes an additional $1.2 billion in construction at two new disposal plants in Kentucky and Colorado, according to the Department of Defense…

Killer Beets – Cecil Adams – Connect Savannah
I recently heard a rumor that sugar processed from beets contains traces of a poison used as a combat weapon in World War II. Is this true? What’s the difference between beet sugar and cane sugar, anyway?…

Crystal dig to open Saturday – Enid News
The Salt Plains Wildlife Refuge Selenite Crystal Dig Area will re-open at 8 a.m. Saturday. The dig area has been closed since April 2007 when vials from Chemical Agent Identification Sets were found…

How Things Work: Tear gas – The Tartan
College activists, street protesters, radical civilians, and perhaps perverted stalkers are all familiar with what tear gas is and what it does. Nowadays, tear gas is usually used by both police for crowd control and by individuals for personal protection…

Simulated attack – Lake County News-Sun
The terrorist was late during a simulated chemical attack drill staged at North Chicago High School on Friday morning to practice coordination between police, fire and Army Reserve units…

I love the smell of napalm and soccer in the morning – Denver/Boulder Decider
So here’s my suggestion: call the team Rocky Mountain Arsenal. The Dick is built on the old site of the Rocky Mountain Arsenal, which was a chemical weapon manufacturing facility until it closed in 1992. What’s a better way to honor that horrific factory of death than by making opposing teams think they might get napalmed…

Remembering Halabja – VOA News
The Iran-Iraq war was in its eighth deadly year. On the front lines of that conflict was the Iraqi city of Halabja, near the border with Iran. An intense air and artillery bombardment shook this city of 50,000, driving the inhabitants underground…

Raman renaissance in defense and security – SPIE
Conventional Raman spectroscopy is established as a versatile technique for both ‘point-and-shoot’ identification and forensic analysis of many illicit materials, including drugs and explosives…

Abbott Furnace Company Ships Munition Treatment Unit – PR Newswire
Abbott Furnace Company, a private Pennsylvania corporation, announced today that it has shipped the first of two Munitions Treatment Units for a chemical demilitarization project in Pueblo, Colorado. The Pueblo plant, which is under construction, will destroy a stockpile of chemical weapons…Communities Seek Accountability for Military Pollution – Common Dreams
More than 80 affected communities and organizations from across the U.S. have joined together to support federal legislation that will require the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy to comply with laws designed to protect human health and the environment…

Destroying a Toxic Threat – The Moscow Times
By Rogelio Pfirter
The Chemical Weapons Convention entered into force in April 1997 and is the first multilateral treaty that bans an entire class of weapons of mass destruction…

Newport Chemical Depot seeks cleanup equipment – Chron
Officials at the Newport Chemical Depot in western Indiana are asking state officials for permission to install a large hot-air dryer to clean materials that may have come into contact with deadly nerve agent or the waste that remained after its destruction…